More about the Venice Biennale

There are much more works that took my attention at the Venice Art Biennale, of caurse...

Marisa Merz had both paintings and installations /sculptures, that were naive and beautiful. 

"In her early work she often created sinuous, organic forms from twisted or knitted sheets of metal, as in her series Untitled (Living Sculptures), begun in 1965. In these works, she molde thin, sheets of aliminum into cocoon-like spirals (...) transforming industrial materials into delicate and dynamic structures. The sculptures were installed in Merz's apartment as well as in gallery spaces, reflecting her insistence on the inextricable relationship between her life and her art.

Another recurrent motif in Merz's work has been the abstracted depiction of female heads, rendered as sculptural busts in clay and wax, or in collage-like paintings and drawings that incorporate a wide range of materials, such as fragments of copper mesh, gold leaf, cardboard, and tape. Though stylistically diverse -from intimate objects that recall relics, to wispy, ethereal pencil drawings, or paintings of bold, interlacing arabesques- the heads are united by the impression of a person's sensibility. Yet in suggesting religious icons, images of mythical goddesses, in addition to self-portraiture, Merz's heads (...) often present themselves without any determinate context or narrative each a timeless manifestation of her inner world. RW" (taken from the text written at the Biennale)

Eva Kotakova from Check Republic made an installation about pressure that tries to make humanity be quite, it was about the opposite of liberty, about quitness, cages... Her work is at the central pavilion at Palazzo Enciclopedico, I Giardini. For me this work is really intense and powerful.


Sarah Luca's sculptures, which were rendered into bronzes were really interesting for me. They were put inside Carlo Scarpa's Sculpture Garden (at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini section), that gave me some kind of a positive energy. I think the artist is lucky about that, but of caurse her works had affected me more than the garden. Her sculptures turn into twisted and knotted bodies, which were sitting, kissing, etc like normal human-beings while they are not actually, they are more like bronze baloons or sausages, which was really interesting I think, because they had the power to make me feel what Luca tried to make us feel. For example with one of her sculptures, I felt its loneliness, sadness. She did some kind of a personification. At the same time their shiny and smooth bronze surfaces created really good contrast with the sharp lines of Scarpa's architectural design.

Marisa Merz

Marisa Merz

Marisa Merz

Eva Kotakova

Sarah Luca

Sarah Luca